Stem cells obtained from adult muscle can multiply as often as stem cells from embryos, indicating that adult-derived cells could be cultivated for treatment purposes.

The findings challenge the notion that embryonic stem cells can be grown in the lab for longer periods than adult stem cells and thus have more therapeutic potential, said lead investigator Johnny Huard, a muscle stem cell expert at Children's Hospital.

"The embryonic stem cell is a very interesting topic of research, but the adult-derived stem cell is not so bad, either," he said. "You can do a lot of things with them."

For the study, published in next month's issue of the journal Molecular Biology of the Cell, stem cells from newborn or young mice were collected and purified.

Co-investigator Bridget Deasy let them grow for 228 days without interference. The cell population doubled more than 300 times, producing an estimated googol, or 1 followed by 100 zeros, of cells.

So "when they say that the embryonic stem cells are the only cells that can grow for a long, long time, this is not true," Huard noted.

It's not leading us to test-tube cures for such diseases as diabetes and Parkinson's, Smith said when I gave him a call at his California home. There is simply no reliable method for turning an embryonic stem cell into the type of cell that can be safely implanted in the body of a disease victim.

The same problems are likely to occur in any attempt to implant embryonic stem cells in humans, he said. But there's a much easier -- and more ominous -- means of employing the technology, he said. The most efficient way of turning embryonic stem cells into the cells needed to treat a certain disease would be to create an embryo that is a clone of the patient. If that embryo could then be implanted into a uterus, the resulting fetus would contain a perfect copy of every cell in the patient's body. The ominous part is that the only way to gain access to those cells would be to abort the fetus. Smith fears that's where we're headed.

To pick just one example among many, finding costs are essentially zero for the 3.5 trillion barrels of oil that soak the clay in the Orinoco basin in Venezuela, and the Athabasca tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Yes, that's trillion -- over a century's worth of global supply, at the current 30-billion-barrel-a-year rate of consumption.

Then you have to get the oil out of the sand -- or the sand out of the oil. In the Mideast, current lifting costs run $1 to $2.50 per barrel at the very most; lifting costs in Iraq probably run closer to 50 cents, though OPEC strains not to publicize any such embarrassingly low numbers. For the most expensive offshore platforms in the North Sea, lifting costs (capital investment plus operating costs) currently run comfortably south of $15 per barrel. Tar sands, by contrast, are simply strip mined, like western coal, and that's very cheap -- but then you spend another $10, or maybe $15, separating the oil from the dirt. To do that, oil or gas extracted from the site itself is burned to heat water, which is then used to "crack" the bitumen from the clay; the bitumen is then chemically split to produce lighter petroleum.

Every time I find a Stem Cell article, I remind my readers that the push for "embryonic stem cell" research has much less to do with scienctific advancement and much more to do with creating a market for aborted fetuses and flesh.

Here is another article laying out the greater promise of adult stem cells. (hat tip to Brother's Judd)

Excerpt:

The prevailing science was that where embryonic stem cells had multi-potentiality and could give rise to all cell types in the body, adult stem cells were old dogs that couldn't be taught new tricks. Even those stem cells in tissues that do regenerate, such as skin, blood and olfactory mucosa, can only give rise to, respectively, more skin, blood and olfactory mucosa, so the accepted wisdom went.

....

"Our experiments have shown adult stem cells isolated from the olfactory mucosa have the ability to develop into many different cell types if they are given the right chemical or cellular environment," explains Mackay-Sim.

....

If the adult stem cells grown by the Griffith team do turn out to be as dramatically useful as all the experiments suggest, there will be even less of an ethical dilemma attached to their use than there is to a blood transfusion. After all, where is the ethical dilemma in having a person's cells used to help cure their own afflictions?

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Bruno's comment:

With every one of these advances, people should note the segments of the "scientific community" that continue to promote the destruction of human beings. (embryonic stem cell research)

Look at who these people fund, and who funds them. The funding network is "the Death Lobby" and/or the promoters of the "Culture of Death." Go two or three layers in, and you'll probably find a connection to the judge working so feverishly to kill Terri Schiavo. Religious people have a name for the source of all of this.

There is evidence that yet another "respected Scientific Foundation" is exposed as a promoter of a political agenda over their putative scientific goals.

Michael Fumento has just posted a piece on how the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation is more interested in hawking stem cell research as a political issue than it is in actually curing diabetes.

As usual, the issue revolves around the fact that adult stem cells are far more effective (and CURRENTLY USABLE) than the liberal holy grail of embryonic stem cell therapies.

I've stated, and will state again and again, that the ENTIRE push for embryonic stem cell research is about abortion and not life saving therapies. With abortion becoming less popular with every new ultrasound breakthrough, the "pro-death" lobby is seeking other markets for human flesh.

If they can succeed in creating a market for embryo/human flesh production, they can bolster the case for abortion. This is why they are pushing so hard in the PR campaign. Like the "global warming" debate, the politics is corrupting the science here.

So wrong. JDRF is the world's largest juvenile diabetes philanthropy, distributing over $85 million in grants last year. Yet it supports no efforts that could lead to a cure any time soon for this blinding and crippling disease that afflicts as many as 1.7 million Americans. Instead it's become a lobby for controversial embryonic stem cell research and refuses to help fund the only study that could soon bring a cure.

Lydia G. Segal is Associate Professor of Criminal Law and Public Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.

Drawing on ten years of undercover work and research in four major school districts, Lydia Segal reveals how systemic waste and fraud siphon millions of dollars from urban classrooms. Segal shows how money is lost in systems that focus on process rather than on results, and how regulations established to curb waste and fraud provide perverse incentives for new forms of both. Calling for renewed powers for principals and a streamlining of oversight, Segal offers a bold, far-reaching plan to reclaim our schools.

Add Darwin's finches, Haeckel's embryoes, Kettlewell's peppered moths and you end up with an unfortunately fair joke:

Q: How do you know when a Darwinist is lying?

A: He says he has evidence of speciation.

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Another Darwinist shown to have falsified data. These guy are REALLY making it too easy.

Excerpt:

"Anthropology is going to have to completely revise its picture of modern man between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago," said Thomas Terberger, the archaeologist who discovered the hoax. "Prof Protsch's work appeared to prove that anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals had co-existed, and perhaps even had children together. This now appears to be rubbish."

The scandal only came to light when Prof Protsch was caught trying to sell his department's entire chimpanzee skull collection to the United States.

An inquiry later established that he had also passed off fake fossils as real ones and had plagiarised other scientists' work.

His discovery appeared to show that Neanderthals had spread much further north than was previously known.

Last Friday's Wall Street Journal contained a barn-burner editorial that ripped the cover off of the left's "global warming" dogma. It featured the 'hockey stick' graph that launched this fake crusade.

This link will only work for WSJ-on-line subcribers, but the excerpt below tell us all we need to know. Whether the issue is Stem Cells (a drive to save abortion by trading in human flesh) or global warming (a drive to control control the "means of production" after Marxism has failed), the idea that "science" is uncompromised lby political clout lies totally exposed.

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Excerpt:

"Yet there were doubts about Mr. Mann's methods and analysis from the start. In 1998, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics published a paper in the journal Climate Research, arguing that there really had been a Medieval warm period. The result: Messrs. Soon and Baliunas were treated as heretics and six editors at Climate Research were made to resign.

Still, questions persisted. In 2003, Stephen McIntyre, a Toronto minerals consultant and amateur mathematician, and Ross McKitrick, an economist at Canada's University of Guelph, jointly published a critique of the hockey stick analysis. Their conclusion: Mr. Mann's work was riddled with "collation errors, unjustifiable truncations of extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculations of principal components, and other quality control defects." Once these were corrected, the Medieval warm period showed up again in the data.

This should have produced a healthy scientific debate. Instead, as the Journal's Antonio Regalado reported Monday, Mr. Mann tried to shut down debate by refusing to disclose the mathematical algorithm by which he arrived at his conclusions."

I've always stated that there are probably some genetic factors to sexual preference, but that there is also a large element of personal choice. Obvioiusly, this is viewed as heresy by today's so-called scientific elite.

Well HERE is a member of that "elite" pretty much saying I was right all along. This is heartening to me.

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Excerpt:

Consistent with an environmental explanation of same sex attraction is the work of Daryl Bem. In a 2000 study, Dr. Bem demonstrated that there is no relationship between genotype and sexual orientation in men unless environmental interaction with the temperamental trait of gender nonconformity is taken in account. In other words, exploring individual temperamental factors lived out within certain environments may provide more precise areas for research into the action of potential genetic factors in the development of sexual attractions.

In summary, the Mustanski study finds no significant relationship between DNA regions and self-reported sexual orientation. Available evidence suggests that genes may be expressed via the interaction of temperament with certain environments. Practically, then, at present, one cannot know with any degree of certainty that a gene or combination of genes will distinguish why one man is homosexual and another is not.

I have access to this link, but you may not. (I'm on the NYTimes registration).

As bad as the NYTimes is on many issues, it seems to maintain intellectual integrity on the science of education. This article is a few years old. I have the entire article, and if you can't get the link, e-mail me and I'll send you the whole thing.

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Excerpt:

But the problem was not only that nothing worked -- the wrong thing worked. In 1968, the federal Office of Education commissioned a multiyear, $500 million study to compare competing approaches to teaching basic skills in the early grades -- the first attempt to see what light ''scientifically based research'' could shed on different teaching methods.

The Follow Through study, as it was called, ultimately involved nine approaches ranging from a highly progressive Open School model to an extremely structured design called Direct Instruction. The results, published in 1977, were stunning: only Direct Instruction significantly raised scores of third graders on a series of achievement tests. Children exposed to more progressive models did far worse than children at ''control'' schools. Direct Instruction was thus the first research-proven pedagogy.

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...and you won't find it used in a single public school in the country. Numerous people should be jailed for this state of affairs.